Coldplay’s sophomore album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, remains their most critically acclaimed and their most commercially successful. For a couple of years following the release of this album, it was actually cool to like Coldplay.
Then, due to their ridiculous success, the whole Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple thing, and who knows what else, it became very uncool to like Coldplay.
My seventh best album of 2002 is the 21st studio album by Elvis Costello. The famously prolific Costello has released nine more albums since, though his current three-year absence is uncharacteristic.
Costello has released few perfect albums over his four-decade career (three or four by my count) but every one of his releases is distinctive. Sometimes it’s a genre play (country, classical, adult contemporary), others a thematic one (the childhood nostalgia of Brutal Youth or the short story forming the spine of The Delivery Man).
Here’s the third straight 2002 album that I discovered only after its release. It’s probably telling that the albums I discovered when they came out that year are sitting higher on my list (we’ll get to most of those next week).
I learned about Stew just a year later after the release of 2003’s Something Deeper Than These Changes. My wife heard a segment on the album on NPR and suggested I check it out. I was instantly smitten and sought out the rest of his discography.
Tift Merritt’s 2002 debut, Bramble Rose, is another album I discovered well after its release. I heard the singer-songwriter’s 2004 sophomore album, Tambourine, first.
Bramble Rose is one of two autographed albums in my collection. The other is also by Merritt, 2012’s Traveling Alone. I guess you could say she and I are tight.
Over the next few weeks I’ll dive into the next installment of an occasional series here at Meet Me in Montauk, where I focus on a single year and post songs from both my favorite albums and the acclaimed albums I’ve never heard.
I started this series with 1972 (my birth year) and subsequently covered 1982 and 1992. Now I jump ahead another decade to 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks, the year I turned 30, the year my first daughter was born.
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